“Sometimes I am angry at people everywhere for their stupidity, for their buying into the American way…” – Barry Lopez, “Emory Bear Hands’ Birds”
What a great summer week, dudes. I went kayaking, took my kid to the beach a different day, whole family went to the movie theater another day. Grilling some chicken wings tonight, eating a Caesar salad, you know. Life! It’s meant to be lived!
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Another book plucked from some Evanston resident’s “get rid of” box at my old bookstore job. Honestly, a book picked solely based on title. I’m unfamiliar with Barry Lopez. I don’t know what I was expecting, looking at the parrot slightly off-cover—some sort of latter period Hemingway/Graham Green-esque thriller? But postmodern? That’s not what this book is. It’s more surprising than that. Still heavily influenced by travel, but also the library stacks. I’m talking, of course, about Light Action In The Caribbean by Barry Lopez.
This collection of stories (published in 2000, late in Lopez’s career) does have all manner of interesting settings. We’re in Peru, then we’re in the western United States, then we’re in the Middle East, then we’re in Asia. Lopez was a traveler and nature writer, and that aspect gives me shades of Shell Collector-era Anthony Doerr. His focus on monks, divorcees becoming shipbuilders, and hidden letters gives me shades of Jorge Luis Borges. A couple of the early stories in the collection give me Denis Johnson vibes (one of the characters even name-checked Jesus’ Son, like, right as I was having that thought). This collection made me think about how big the world is, and also made me have warm thoughts about postmodernist writing. Typically I abhor footnotes, but there’s a story in here made almost entirely out of them, and it’s awesome. I’m not going to say “drop everything you’re doing and go read Light Action In the Caribbean.” If you’ve got a Borges itch that needs scratching, though—get at my guy Barry.
I am going to drop a trigger warning for violence/sexual violence on the title story. It is part of a really, really clever twist, though. And we’re not talking Girl With The Dragon Tattoo or anything—just, take care of yourselves.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? I’ve really, really gotten into that AOUI band I linked a while back. Here’s my current favorite song of theirs, “For Now.” Epilepsy TW on this video:
In the wake of the New York Times’ silly, limited, mostly-pretentious “best books of the 21st century so far” list, Kelsey McKinney at Defector asks: who are these big book lists for? My pithy answer is “people who don’t read but want to be seen as Having Read.” Kelsey goes deeper, though.
J.D. Vance, Trump’s VP pick and human slice of oven-roasted ham left on the hood of a Cybertruck in summer heat, sucks shit. He’s a suburban soft boy from Ohio who got famous by convincing mainly New York Times readers it’s okay to blame hillbillies for their problems instead of the US’s systemic hatred of poor people. Hub City Books compiled a bunch of Actually Good books by Actual Appalachian writers, in case you want some perspective from Them Whom Live In Hollers.
Late to this, but you know who never gets asked their opinions on book banning? The teenagers and kids who now can’t access most of libraries. If they’re anything like when I was a kid, they’ve been fed a steady diet of Fahrenheit 451 and aren’t treating it like an instruction manual. The Brooklyn Public Library has a writeup and link to a new study, In Their Own Words, where the kids get to speak their minds about those books that got banned by those freaks.
Speaking of libraries, I saw someone wearing a “what’s more punk rock than the public library” shirt in Home Depot this weekend. I also enjoyed Emily Drabinski in In These Times writing about the library as a commons. Here’s a money quote about Carnegie building libraries and then hiring Pinkertons to a break a strike: “Ironically, as industrialists imagined they could use libraries to mollify populations subject to the ravages of capitalism, library buildings stood as temples to democratic access to ideas.”
If you listened to this week’s The Line Break podcast (Apple | Spotify | Soundcloud), and I briefly get into the “do undergrads read 600 pages a week?” discourse that was going around Twitter. Official The Line Break stance is 600 pages is too much, and learning should both be enjoyed and actually stick in your brain. Still, the people who read the most in the world besides monks are probably undergraduates. Here’s Osita Nwanevu in The Guardian about how campus leftists are the most reliably consistently correct group of people in the United States.
What’re you still doing here? Did you know I am friends with a real-life astronaut trainer? That’s right, the guy who makes sure people who go to space come back from space. Brian Ramos is a stand-up dude and a great workshop instructor, plus he has a YouTube channel about space. Here’s a video about how the Apollo mission guys swore, just, like, so goddamn creatively. I’m in it!
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. When I worked boats/restaurants/parking offices, it was hard for me to have the energy to read after a shift, and before a shift, I was dreading the shift too much. It’s easy to say on the other side of things, but if the customers get you down this weekend, try reading a fun novel. Just see what it does for your soul.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris